The Ross Sea

The Ross Sea followed the Amundsen Sea, which extends furthest south and was therefore particularly attractive to early Antarctic explorers. The flagship of this region is its southern boundary - a glacier tongue: the Ross Ice Shelf (it feels like everything here is named after and/or by the explorer James Ross), whose edge spans a whopping 800km (!!!) from east to west.

800 km is a long way to go (especially at about 20 km/h...), so the relatively uneventful days continued. At least the mentioned opening in the icefield before the Ross Sea held up, we slipped through and now had a day ahead according to schedule, while we were one day behind after the Peter I Island. We 'used' this time to have our cameras thoroughly checked and adjusted in the framework of our booked photography course - afterwards the results suit us much better (and if not, at least the uncertainty is gone that it could be caused by a wrong setting).

On January 31st (by the way, halfway through our tour), the time had come: we were presented with the Ross Ice Shelf. We were woken up at 04:10 (in the morning!), the sun was pretty high in the south (which is actually the 'wrong' side here), and we glided along an endless ice wall of about 15-20m height (approximately the height of our boat, from the top deck we could just see the plain behind the ice edge).

Here at the ice edge, the wildlife was much more abundant than before - minke whales frolicked around the boat, orcas passed by several times, and Adelie penguins were seen both swimming and as passengers on ice floes. We were flown over to the ice shelf with our helicopters and could stretch our legs there for a while. More spectacular than being present on the shelf was the flight along the edge of the ice, as an encore we also saw a group of orcas from above, as well as some penguins and seals.

In the morning it was still somewhat cloudy and hazy, but that changed on the afternoon drive - now the ice was beautifully illuminated, and we saw more minke whales as well as large groups of Adelie penguins. The camera shutters ran hot in unison ... Later - after dinner - we crossed our first larger pack ice field, still in brilliant sunshine. Simply fantastic. And as if the day hadn't been great enough already, we now saw 3 (individual) emperor penguins here - they are the largest of the penguins, and it was not clear if we would see even one.

After many not so exciting days at sea, we had certainly been richly rewarded for the long wait on this day...